Jamie Lee Curtis invented Instagram, per Jamie Lee Curtis
By Dan Selcke
Jamie Lee Curtis reveals that she “invented Instagram,” and it’s not clear how sarcastic she’s being.
Remember when Al Gore said that he was responsible for “creating the internet” back in 1999? That bit of exaggeration haunted the former vice president in the form memes, think-pieces, and political put-downs for years, so when Jamie Lee Curtis says that she “invented Instagram” without blinking an eye, we can’t help but be concerned for her.
Her admission came during an interview with Jess Cagle on Sirius XM’s EW Radio. The Halloween actress is currently out promoting her new FOX show Scream Queens, but if she wants to rewrite what we thought we knew about social media while she’s at it, we won’t stop her.
See, I’d feel better about this if I was sure she was being sarcastic, but the way Curtis earnestly says “I invented Instagram about six years ago” before launching into an explanation about how she posted her friends’ photos on her defunct Google blog makes me worried that she’s being serious. Even assuming that she didn’t license every photo she posted on that blog to Google, she’s was hardly the first person to think of posting pictures online. Also, and I could be wrong about this, but I suspect that when she says “I’m a photographer,” what she means is “My phone has a camera and I like to use it.” There are some grey areas there, meaning-wise.
Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, the on-the-record inventors of Instagram, had no comment, in part because we didn’t reach out to them. But if we had, they probably wouldn’t have had any comment.
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